Australian Government departments and agencies now place increasing amounts of information on their websites and intranets. As the volume of material increases, the need for effective search facilities to help users locate specific information on these sites increases with it.

Agencies should ensure that users can discover content on their site through both internal and external search services.

What should I do?

External search

Website entry points are increasingly being initially accessed via an external search service, rather than by a website’s home page. Agency websites typically observe an average of only 15% of users accessing their website by directly typing in their website name, with fewer than 4% being referred by links between sites (Source: australia.gov.au usage stats – Q1 2010). The remainder is typically organically-derived traffic from external search queries.

Agency website managers will be able to derive maximum value from their site’s content by ensuring that it is easily discoverable by external search engines.

Internal search

Providing an effective search facility on websites, extranets or intranets involves more than just installing a search engine package ‘out of the box’. Effective search facilities match the site they support and the site’s users. They are tested with real content and users, and refined as appropriate. A search facility should be able to give priority to key pages, as defined by users and site owners.

Search and metadata

External search engines take advantage of a handful of metadata values:

• Description/DCTERMS.Description
• Title/DCTERMS.Title
• Date/DCTERMS.Modified, DCTERMS.Published, DCTERMS.Created
• Keywords (occasionally)

Increasingly, external search engines are indexing certain types of structured data that describe ‘things’ within pages. Details of organisations, people and events are all types of content that could benefit from the application of structured data, usually in the form of Resource Description Framework-in-attributes (RDFa), Microformats or Microdata.

Agencies wanting to add additional filters or scopes to their internal search may choose to invest in additional metadata fields. For example:

• Author
• Licence (e.g. Copyright Commonwealth of Australia, Creative Commons, etc.)
• Document Type (e.g. Publication, Media Release, Dataset, Moving Image, etc.)
• Function
• Spatial Coverage

Common metadata elements like these can be used by both the Agency Search service and the whole-of-government search service at australia.gov.au.

Agency search

Australian Government agencies are encouraged to use the Agency Search service to enable search capabilities on their externally-facing websites. AGIMO provides the Agency Search service to Australian Government agencies at no cost.

Publicly-facing web content on an agency site is refreshed nightly by the Agency Search service, with full indexes occurring once a week. Extensive result customisation and reporting options are available.

The Agency Search service can be seen in use at:

• Centrelink
• Medicare Australia
• Australian Bureau of Statistics
• Bureau of Meteorology

Further documentation on implementing the Agency Search service is available at:

Funnelback Documentation for Agencies.

How do I?

Optimise your site for search before you optimise search for your site

Optimising a site for search will usually produce benefits for both external and internal searches, whereas configuring and customising a search service for a site typically only benefits internal searches.

Optimising sites for search is a responsibility that should be shared by content authors, website developers and web administrators alike.

Search engine optimisation

You can use some simple techniques to improve your site’s ranking on results pages – known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). External search engines use a number of methods for ranking results, but typically determine relevance via the quality of a site’s content and the number of inbound links.

To get the best results on the widest range of searches, you need to determine the most likely search terms from both internal and external sources, then ensure that your target pages are titled and structured accordingly.

For example, a page within a site may be called ‘National Transition Strategy’. However, external search engines and users who may not yet be at your site may not be able to differentiate between national transition strategies published by other countries, or other sectors, or other areas of interest. Modifying the title to ensure that it retains context outside of its home can prompt users and search engines alike to better determine relevance. A better title may be ‘National Accessibility Transition Strategy’.

Consider using negative words or colloquial equivalents of official terms if you think they are likely search terms: many writers lose web visibility by focusing entirely on the positive.

Enterprise search engines make use of links, anchor text and Uniform Resource Locator (URL) structures used by the leading public search engines to rank important resources above those which are merely relevant. By improving site structure, page markup, and interlinking, using simple URLs and descriptive anchor text, results from external search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and their competitors) can be improved.

Links are vitally important. Typically, enterprise search engines give higher page rankings to sites which link to a range of popular sites. It’s worth adding as many links to your page as you can within the guidelines. At a minimum, you should link to any other government sites that are related.

Implement internal search

Agencies should determine whether the whole of government search offering (Agency Search) is fit for purpose or there is a need for separate search facility. Once the search facility has been procured, the next step is to design the search interface and search results page. A well-designed search service should:

• focus on meeting general user needs
• keep the search form simple
• make the search facility available throughout the site
• consider whether advanced search options should be provided
• test search interfaces with users
• provide an appropriate level of detail for each result
• ensure that descriptions are meaningful
• provide analytics to report on the effectiveness of the service.

Lastly, agencies need to configure their search engine to ensure that the most relevant results are presented to users. Configuration options may include:

• ‘and-ing’ search terms by default
• using URL structure, links and descriptive anchor text to ‘bring forward’ important pages
• author-suggested ‘best bets’
• implementing synonyms and taxonomies
• automatic spell-checking
• stemming and ‘fuzzy matching’
• ‘federated’ searching across several related collections
• ‘faceted’ searching for drilling down on structured collections.

Subjects:

• search
• metadata